Cleopatra: A Life

Cleopatra searches for allies, but finds she has few. Antony is in despair, dismissing his entourage and trying to live as a hermit before making his way back to the Alexandrian palace. Attempting to appease the Alexandrians, Antony and Cleopatra initiate a series of feasts and celebrate their children’s birthdays, but Octavian continues his pressure, demanding that Cleopatra murder Antony to keep her throne. Cleopatra builds a mausoleum next to a temple of Isis and heaps all of her treasure inside, threatening to destroy it if Octavian invades Egypt, holding him at bay for a time.

When Octavian does invade Alexandria, Cleopatra, recognizing Antony’s clear defeat, locks herself in her mausoleum, implying that she has killed herself, in order to “encourage Antony to kill himself” (273), as Antony had already promised to do to keep Cleopatra safe. Receiving the news that Cleopatra has died by suicide, Antony commands his servant to kill him, but the servant cannot bring himself to act, and kills himself instead. When Antony attempts to die by suicide, driving a sword through his torso, he is not immediately successful. Antony is brought to Cleopatra, where he dies in her arms.

Octavian has no intention of allowing Cleopatra to continue to rule. He captures her in her mausoleum, denying her request to kill herself and be buried with Antony. He recognizes the propagandistic power of parading the captured queen of Egypt through Roman streets and intends to keep her alive. Cleopatra, unwilling to face the same fate as her sister, manages to ingest poison, and soon dies alongside two handmaidens. She is 39 years old at the time of her death.

Flush with Cleopatra’s fortune, Octavian initiates an era of prosperity in Rome and throughout the empire, beginning a new world historic era. He has Caesarian executed, marries off Cleopatra’s other children, and assumes his role as emperor, changing his name to Augustus. Mark Antony is scrubbed from historical records while Cleopatra, in the following years, is presented as a great enemy of Rome, a sorceress, and a seductress.

Throughout the intervening centuries, representations of Cleopatra have been flawed, drawing from hostile Roman histories until as recently as the 1930s, when she was known as “the wickedest woman in history” (299). Schiff contends, however, that even thousands of years of misrepresentation have not obscured the factual history of an eminently capable queen, a savvy politician, and “a strategist of the first rank” (301).